The cleaning and disinfecting of hard surfaces is important in both residential and commercial settings. The increasing importance of hygiene combined with the fast moving pace of the modern world has created a need for antibacterial products with fast cleaning and disinfecting action. The main concerns are to effectively reduce bacteria and maintain a consumer acceptable aesthetics profile while producing an acceptable human and environmentally safe composition. As will be appreciated, this implicitly puts constraints on the amount and type of chemicals that can be used to formulate a commercially acceptable composition.
As such, there remains a need for a cleaning and disinfecting product with a much more efficient antibacterial system that also maintains a consumer acceptable aesthetics profile while producing an acceptable human and environmentally safe composition.
It has surprisingly been found that when combining a metal salt, preferably a divalent metal salt, and, in one embodiment, Zn2+-salt, with a linear alkyl nucleophilic surfactant with antibacterial activity, such as linear alkyl amine oxide, an unexpected antibacterial killing efficiency boost to the linear alkyl nucleophilic surfactant has been observed as compared to when the linear alkyl nucleophilic surfactant is formulated alone. As such, the intrinsic antibacterial efficacy of linear nucleophilic surfactants, such as linear alkyl amine oxide, is further leveraged and the need for further antibacterial technologies is limited, minimizing the impact on product aesthetics and human and environmental safety profile accordingly.